“You cannot erase differences; people don’t want to give up their differences. The trick is to see if we can live with what is different.”
– Adam B. Seligman

Christianity, Judaism and Islam all share the belief in a single, universal God, leaving one to wonder what all of the conflict is about.

“Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share a sandbox: They share a belief in a monotheistic creator God; they share a vision of salvation; they all struggle with the idea of a founder or prophet who communicates the truth from the other [transcendent world] to this realm,” said Adam Seligman, a professor of religion at Boston University.

But the nature of God and how to reach God are very different in each of the three faith traditions. As a way of transcending the fault lines between the religions, some suggest focusing on Abraham – revered by all three faiths – as the common link to bring unity and peace.

Seligman is skeptical of the “Abrahamic” approach: Theologically, Abraham plays a significantly different role in the three religions. But more importantly, attempting to "same-ize" these three faith traditions misses a more important point – the need to understand and appreciate the crucial differences, Seligman said.

“You cannot erase differences; people don’t want to give up their differences,” he said. “The trick is not to get behind the battle lines by erasing differences, but rather to see if we can live with what is different. That’s what I think is the real challenge.”

Understanding religious differences is difficult in secular culture, which has a tendency to erase differences by excluding religion from the public square.

“We privatize our differences in our private realm; and when we meet publicly, those differences aren’t supposed to come to the fore,” Seligman said. “But there’s a reaction to that. People want their differences to be expressed publicly – lighting a menorah on Boston common, celebrating Kwanza just like Christmas. People want to be recognized as different in the public realm. … The challenge is how to live with difference, and I think that’s the way we have to approach the problem rather than by erasing, denying, minimizing or trivializing what is different.”

Transcendence and other-hood

“God brings a transcendent realm, which is perfect, as opposed to where we live – a realm of frailty, mutability, injustice, scarcity, a struggle for resources.”

What are the similarities and differences between Judaism, Christianity and Islam? On the larger map of human history, the monotheistic religions are relative newcomers: Judaism, Christianity and Islam arose during the period from about 600 B.C.E. (“before the common era,” or before Christ) to 600 C.E. (“common era,” the same as A.D.). During this period, a transformation of religious thought was taking place simultaneously across the near East and Asia.

“In different ways, over a period of 1,000 years, there emerged throughout the world a notion of transcendence – the realization of the total other-hood,” Seligman said. By contrast, the gods of ancient Greece and Rome were not transcendent; they were immortal, but they had human qualities and failings – lust, jealousy and greed – a sort of aggrandized self.

But the God of monotheism is something different. It is “totally other”; it is morally perfect, Seligman said. “God brings a transcendent realm, which is perfect, [as opposed to] where we live – a realm of frailty, mutability, injustice, scarcity, a struggle for resources,” he said. “When you have this chasm between this world and the transcendent world – between a mutable, finite, unjust world, and a world of ethical and material plenitude – you get an ambivalent relationship with this world. The believer is always evaluating this world and judging it in terms of the transcendent world, he said. This creates a tension between one’s religious feeling and what happens in this world – the perfect world vs. the imperfect world.”

Some religions resolve this tension by rejecting the world and retreating to monasticism. Others might resort to radical fundamentalism and lash out at the world.

“In monotheism, you can’t be totally world-rejecting: If God created the world, it can’t be all bad, because God created it,” Seligman said. “But on the other hand, you’re still always judging the world in terms of these transcendent meanings and ethical standards. So you’re caught, and you have to live with this tension. All monotheistic religions try to accommodate this tension.”

The rise of monotheism

Seligman correlates the emergence of monotheism with the “Axial Age,” a period from 800 B.C.E. to 200 C.E., during which time several important developments in culture, philosophy and religion arose simultaneously, but independently.

German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) posited theory of an Axial Age by connecting together – during this 1,000 time period – the emergence of the Hebrew prophets in the near East, the great philosophers of ancient Greece, Zoroaster in Persia, Buddha of India and Confucius in China.

“The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period,” Jaspers wrote in The Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy. “Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers – Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato – of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.”

The most basic feature of the Axial Age, according to Jaspers, was a movement toward reflective consciousness – the ability to use reason to transcend the immediate, empirical reality.

The powerful thinking that took place during the Axial Age was crucial to the realization of monotheism and transcendence, according to Seligman. (Read more details on the Axial Age here.)

Salvation and grace

So how does one get from this world to the perfect, transcendent world of the “Axial” god? The monotheistic religions provide this bridge through various forms of salvation.

Before monotheism, connecting with God was more straightforward. For example, to ensure a plentiful harvest, one could offer sacrifices to appease the gods and call for rain. But pleasing the new God is more complicated. “If the wheat isn’t growing, it’s not because we didn’t give the proper sacrifice, but maybe because we sinned,” Seligman said.

The impediment to salvation is sin, impurity and unbelief. In Christianity and Islam, there are many different forms of impurity – as a state of being – such as original sin. In Judaism sin is an uncompleted action, “missing the mark” rather than a state of being, Seligman said.

“Judaism does not have the idea of original sin, which in Christianity is a state of being that can be made good by grace,” he said. “In Judaism, you go to the synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, which is the day of penitence for one’s sins, and people read a laundry list of sins – all of these things that you got wrong, but it’s not a state of being. This is a big difference in the conception of this world and how to get from here to there.”

Transformation of politics

The rise of monotheism fundamentally changed the political structure throughout the world. Heretofore, political leaders were considered god-like or even gods themselves, such as the pharaohs of ancient Egypt and the Roman Emperors. Christianity and Islam changed all of that.

In medieval Christendom, the European kings fashioned themselves as the “best representation of God” with a “divine right” to their positions. But they were not Gods. And since they were not gods, the kings could be wrong or make mistakes.

The new religious order began to break down tribal society. The boundaries of blood bonds and kinship could be penetrated by converting to a religion – unlike race and ethnicity, which are fixed by birth.

The new religious order also gave rise to a new elite: priests, clerics and religious scholars who had power outside of politics. The uncoupling of political, religious and intellectual leadership allowed pluralism to emerge, Seligman said.

Religion, order and meaning

The 19th century political philosopher Karl Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses” – a tool used by the rich to keep the poor obedient and blind to their condition.

In less cynical terms, religion provides social order. At a personal level, it provides meaning, Seligman said.

“People have to decide the rules of their [social] organization,” he said. “Nobody does this for us. In this way we are very different from other animals, which do not have a problem with meaning; they are hardwired. But when we organize our society, we have to put it together and provide meaning for ourselves.”

For example, there is no natural rule for humans dictating who will be a doctor, a lawyer or garbage collector; nor is there a fixed formula for how much money someone is going to make, Seligman said.

“There is no genetic rule to say who does what; there is no rule saying what is the just and meaningful exchange of our labor – we have to come up with that ourselves. Religion in that sense provides meaning,” Seligman said.

“We have to say there is justice in the fact that the going rate for a neurosurgeon is 100 times that for a garbage man. We have to say that is just – and that is not written anywhere. We together as human beings have to constitute that meaning. Religion – discovered or invented – provides meaning and order to human existence that in and of itself does not have the terms of meaning.”

Providing meaning for death is equally important as the meaning of life. Religion addressed death long before the arrival of monotheism.

“Archeologists have discovered primitive human graveyards as old as 20,000 years. There was a delineation of the dead. We came to a realization that we die, and we had to come to terms with it. More than anything else, religion provides us meaning in the shadow of death,” Seligman said.

Fundamentalism

One of the basic characteristics of fundamentalism is rejection of the modern world – or at least certain aspects of it. But the fact that fundamentalism exists today makes it a part of the modern world.

“It is very important to understand that fundamentalism is an aspect of modernity,” Seligman said. “We can look at fundamentalism in two very different ways: We can see it as a modern movement and the response of religion in modernity. It can also be seen as a particular way of religious thinking – having to do with how texts are interpreted – that has always existed. The fundamentalist streak, that way of understanding texts, is an aspect of all religious thought.”

Seligman said the relative importance of tradition, revelation and reason has long been a source of debate in the interpretation of sacred texts.

“In different periods, one or another interpretation becomes predominant. In Judaism and Islam, you have a felt tension between the authority of revelation and the authority of reason and interpretation. This tension goes back to the beginning of written documents,” he said.

“There are all kinds of ‘fundamentalisms’ – some you can enter a dialogue with and others you can’t. The fundamentalist mode is one half rejection of the dialogue, but the dialogue is possible. If we want to fight fundamentalism of all types, and I’m not sure if we do, the way to do it is not to try to conquer and destroy it militarily. Instead of an absolute rejection of religion, what’s possible is a different attitude toward it where religion and reason enter into dialogue.” (See “Faith and Reason in Action.”)

Appendix: Disputing the Axial Age

Jaspers’ Axial Age is a macro-historical hypothesis, and thus contains many points for contention. Historian John Landon says the primary weakness of Jaspers’ theory is that it omits the most important religious developments of the common era.

“One problem with Jaspers’ approach, as Toynbee pointed out, is that the ‘axial age’ doesn’t include all the ‘axial’ effects, e.g. the birth of Christianity and Islam, or, on the other end, the early forms of monotheism in proto-Zoroastrianism, etc.,” Landon wrote in World History And The Eonic Effect: Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution.

“The term ‘axial’ is often associated with religion. But a close look at the ‘axial effect’ shows that this period is also producing philosophy, science, democracy, many forms of art, and the last beautiful flowering of Greek polytheism. What is the common denominator here?”

Prof. Stephen T. Chan of Seattle University notes that Jesus and Mohammed did not live during the Axial Age. (Jesus was roughly 600 years later than Buddha, while Mohammed was born at about 570 C.E.) Instead, Jaspers classifies Jesus together with Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius, in the category of paradigmatic individuals.

“Jaspers’ hypothesis of Axial Age should not be taken as law of human history but as helpful observation of the founding of ancient philosophy and religions,” Chan wrote. “It is a convenient entry point for further observations and comparisons.”

A conference of the European University Institute noted that the Axial Age could be made inclusive of Islam and Christianity:

“The concept of the axial age in a limited sense of the word denotes this set of parallel intellectual and cosmological breakthroughs. However, these shifts later ushered in two other momentous transformations, namely first the formation of the great world religions and secondly the emergence of a number of imperial political orders across the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere. The concept the axial age in a wider sense encompasses also these macro-institutional transformations.”

Axial Transformations

From a conference of the European University Institute
“The so-called axial age during the centuries around the middle of the first millennium B.C. marked, in Karl Jaspers’ classical formulation ... a breakthrough in critical reflexivity ... In all its manifestations, it involved dramatic shifts in the direction of, firstly, an increasing human reflexivity and reflective consciousness; this is what Jaspers saw as the most basic feature. It involved the ability to use reason to transcend the immediately given.
“These deep-seated intellectual and cosmological shifts occurred in different forms but with striking relative simultaneity across the Eastern hemisphere and were manifest in such different forms as the thought of Confucius and Mencius in China, Buddha in India, the Hebrew prophetical movement and the classical age in Greek philosophy.”

Outline

Links

Understanding world religions

Judaism, Christianity and Islam arose in an age of transcendence

All are not one